A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written and published in England in 1792, near the end of the Enlightenment era. The tenets of Wollstonecraft’s argument are representative of Enlightenment values. Because the piece was written during the French Revolution, in response to a French politician named Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord—author of A Vindication of the Rights of Men—Wollstonecraft is hyperconscious of her place within contemporary politics. Significantly, Wollstonecraft completed the work very quickly in an attempt to respond to Talleyrand-Périgord’s misogyny in a timely manner before it faded from public consciousness. In her response, Wollstonecraft continually emphasizes the concepts of liberty and reason, which have great temporal significance because of the French Revolution. Despite being British and therefore informed by the British canon, Wollstonecraft’s arguments reflect contemporary politics and broader European current events.
The arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman rely on Wollstonecraft’s previous experiences and historical context a great deal. As she addresses issues like education and the military, she draws on her context as a woman and an intellectual at the end of the Enlightenment period. The revolutionary attitudes that overtook Europe and the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century are present in her writing, and she applies them to the issue of women’s material rights in an attempt to focus on the conditions of her own people. Her emphasis on liberty and reason reflects the confluence of the philosophical ideas of the time and her experience of living as a woman in England.
